You don’t need expensive resources to encourage deeper thinking

On Thursday I ran a workshop with Hamish at a technology conference in Melbourne. It was their inaugural event and it was great to support their first one. Hundreds of teachers gave up their school holidays to learn from each other and take part in a range of sessions, from bots to code to problem solving and everything in between.

Hamish and I decided to run something completely new. It extended a workshop activity idea I had called What Would Sergey Do? It plays with the notion of what Sergey Brin would do with the problem you are facing. No surprise such an idea came out of some event production work we did for Google back in 2014.

I built on the idea a few months later in a blog post that imagined a creative council of advisors or mentors helping you see your challenge in different ways.

Just picture an imaginary Classroom Creative Council of visionaries, inventors and innovators from our past and present, who epitomise the mindsets and dispositions we all want to uphold.

We had also explored a workshop task previously using a slide filled with logos from different businesses and simply asked What Would X Do? (that I think Ewan McIntosh had used) It was this concept Hamish and I wanted to play with and see what would happen.

At the heart of it is a discrete step to challenge participants to take a different perspective. To actively change habitual thinking from inside known domains, to something more divergent.

We ran with the idea that during the workshop the participants would assume the role of one of eight chosen “visionaries, inventors and innovators from our past and present, who epitomise the mindsets and dispositions we all want to uphold.” They would then work with others of the same persona and in mixed groups to explore a problem.

As we developed the session we focused on the qualities or values that we want to surround the problem with, not simply the people. As a shortlist we had:

Disruption / Risk taking / Empathy / Equity / Global / Ambition / Visionary

With these in mind we cast our nets widely, developing a list of potential characters to use for the session. We ended up with the following:

Walt Disney / Elon Musk / Sheryl Sandberg / Ada Lovelace / Amelia Earhart / Jane McGonigal / Sir David Attenborough / Leonardo Da Vinci

We made up some cards for each participant, with a number of simple details about the characters. All they had to do was try and see the problem through that character’s lense. Playing a character for an hour, tapping into some drama skills and focusing on the values the character embodies.

You don’t need expensive resources to encourage deeper, divergent or more creative thinking.

We just had a bit of card and a provocation.

It was good to run with something new and work alongside my colleague Hamish — co-facilitating these types of sessions makes it much more fun. After a couple of short rounds exploring the problem we wrapped up with some group feedback. We had plenty of really positive reactions and taking on a role seemed to help people think in a different way.

One of my favourite pieces of feedback on the session was.

Thanks for the break from my own brain.

(There were some other pedagogical choices we made for the session, which I might share and reflect on in future posts.)